Various types of milking systems useful in handling and milking large numbers of cows with mechanized milking machines are known. Particularly, stalls are known having entrance gates at one end and exit gates at the other end such as found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,928,819; 2,904,002; and 3,805,742. Special designs for milking stalls are known as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 2,593,597 including a milking plant having an animal passage leading to a series of open-ended stall units arranged end-to-end.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,513,687 discloses a feeding apparatus comprising a manger having a plurality of control gates which provide sequential entry into the feeding stalls. These control gates pivot upwardly about a pivot point located on the rotating manger structure to release the animals all at once. A specially designed L-shaped gate is used in front of each of the stalls.
Another system known as the herringbone parlor and is disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,157,157; 3,699,922; 3,885,528; 4,419,961; and 4,508,059. The animals enter at one end of the miling parlors, move through the stall locations of the herringbone unit and stop at various feeding locations along the way. The cows are not separated with respect to each other in these herringbone stalls. All of the stalls are open at the same time and therefore the first cow to enter may choose any stall and will not necessarily choose to enter the desired farthest or end stall.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,810,442 discloses a milking system for milking large numbers of cows using a pair of reciprocating shuttling platforms. One platform is batch-loaded and moved to a milking station where the cows are milked while a second parallel platform is being loaded. After the first milking operation, the loaded second platform is moved to the milking station and the first platform returned to the original loading station and unloaded and reloaded. This complex system requires many moving parts making it cumbersome to use and expensive to install and maintain.